


Quantum Entanglement

by TrickySleeves



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Morning After, Nerds in Love, Physics, Rovelli (quoted), one-night stand to lovers, pining and masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:54:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26356048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrickySleeves/pseuds/TrickySleeves
Summary: Sometimes, things go your way: you get a major paper published, you get all the grant money you need for your research, you enjoy what you do.And sometimes, they don't, such as when your unforgettably sexy one-night stand walks into your lab as your newest intern.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 64
Kudos: 161





	1. Hypothesis

**1\. Hypothesis**

_“The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an ‘event.’ It makes no sense to ask where this kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of a network of kisses, not stones.”_

**1.1: T - 75 days, 2 hrs; (22:00)**

The pool cue cracks against an off-white ball stained blue and gray from years of abuse. It hits Byleth’s striped thirteen, which bumps off the side wall, narrowly passes Felix’s burgundy seven, and falls neatly into the corner pocket. It’s her favorite use of vectors, and she nails it every time.

She pumps her fist and grins cattily about another win, “Downed the thirteen ball. Who’s lucky tonight?”

Felix knows it’s not luck. There’s a word for someone who beats you ten times in a night: a fucking pool shark. He steps closer, and she can feel the heat from his eyes, russet in the dim light. For a moment, she thinks he might grab her and ask for his money back. If he lays a finger on her, well she has her pool cue in hand and the bouncer in her sights. Then, he says, “Another round.”

“You want me to beat you again?”

He racks up the balls, fingers moving deftly. There’s a tattoo on the side of his pointer finger before the first knuckle where he can worry at it with his thumb. She had first seen it when he used his left hand to guide the pool cue, and now curiosity is getting the better of her. She creeps around behind him to read it: **∆ S ≥ 0**.

Boltzmann’s second principle. Entropy and the illusory arrow of time. Oh, she’s in so much trouble.

This time, as they play, she watches his mind calculate the angles. He tries out different hefts with his cue, anticipating the force needed for a long diagonal across the table.

He’s tied his black hair back into a bun. The strands that have come loose frame sharp features in a face reluctant to smile. Every time he bends over to shoot, she can’t stop looking at his back. Even under the black t-shirt she can tell that he’s muscular. The sort of person who takes care of himself.

He’s actually good at pool; she’s just better. They shoot until the table is mostly cleared. He has four balls to go, and she has one, so she leans her back against the rail, “I know we just met, but after I beat you this time, would you like to come home with me?” She keeps her face straight when he doesn’t say anything. His silence is her first real loss of the night, not counting the one game she let him win by knocking in the eight ball.

He steps away from the opportunity of a perfect shot at his own ball. With the cue haphazardly lined up, he looks up at her, slides a smirk high into the corner of his mouth, and shoots her winning ball into the side pocket. “You win. Let’s go,” he says, and he drops his cue on the table.

**1.2: T - 74 days, 17 hrs, 30 min; (06:30)**

The man in her bed was sleeping peacefully, jaw relaxed, long dark eyelashes feathering from closed eyes, and no sign at all of the hangover that was currently pounding her own brain to mush.

She could see why she had brought him home. Hair the blue-black of raven wings filtered across his skin, making a contrast so stark she could have woken up in a black-and-white film. He had a hand thrown over her shoulder. Clean nails, strong and somewhat thin fingers. Entropy tattoo on his pointer. Oh, he was her kind of poison alright.

She let herself snooze her alarm again, and snuggled into the warm space he was making. What had started it? 

He hadn’t liked losing at pool, the first time or the tenth time. The one game she had sunk the 8 ball, it had been so that she could buy _him_ a drink. It was petty teasing for the way he had made fun of her sugary cocktail, but it had been worth it to see the look on his face when she handed him the fruity drink, spiked with equal parts simple syrup and tequila. His face at those fucking maraschino cherries, scrunched and disappointed at the entire world for the very existence of those chemically-pink cherries.

That was part of why his long black hair was spreading over her pillow and gathering more tangles. Tangles that were nesting into the tangles from last night. That, and the satisfied russet-eyed look of someone who liked to be ravaged every now and again.

So much so that he seemed to be sticking around, leaving behind those strands of black hair, chest sleepy sighing into the morning, rather than getting gone on his walk of shame like any respectable one-night stand.

Her neck stung, swollen and warm. Her feet dropped from the side of the bed, landing on papers that had spilled into a wretched mess on the floor. Space-time diagrams rushed into entropic calculations and data charts, all of which were blaming her for not numbering the pages. But she hadn’t expected to be bring a man home from the Downer. And she especially hadn’t expected to wake up with her neck covered in deep purple hickeys.

He stirred and rolled onto his back. Her eyes traced up his arm, around his bicep a slightly faded Feynman diagram. On his chest up near his left collarbone, the top part of it just peeking out over the blankets, a model of a relativity timecone. She remembered running her mouth over each of them last night, and it had never occurred to her to ask if he still studied physics. They hadn’t time. They were busy: tandem thrusting, licking, loving, biting machines.

Standing over the bed with her head cradled in one hand, the details filled in. She remember tugging him to another climax, even though they were both almost falling asleep because it would have been the third time he came, sixth time for her. She remember thinking she was about to get blasé about this whole attraction, when he went low to bite her ass and cram his fingers up inside her, and she was his puppet for another twenty minutes, leaving her brain as scrambled as the fucking pages of her notes on to the floor.

She slipped on a pair of underwear from the ground before leaning over and poking him. Her half-covered ass-cheeks were dappled with more lust-colored hickeys and a glorious bite mark. 

“Hey, um.” His eyes flew open, red-rimmed and bloodshot surrounding the copper she remembered from last night. “Hey,” she grasped in her mind for his name. “Hey, Felix, I’m going to shower now, and um, I expect you’re going to be gone by the time I get out, so get home safely, okay? Bye now.”

Felix groaned and wiped a hand across his forehead. If he wasn’t used to mixing sugar with his booze, he was in for a nasty hangover too. It was almost cruel to send him on his way. But the guy you take home from the Downer at night isn’t the guy you bring to breakfast at Village Coffee the next morning.

She was still standing over him, wondering if she should check his vital signs, when his hands shot out from under the covers. He grasped both sides of her head and brought her surprised face down to his.

When he kissed her, it was hard and rushed. A super grumpy morning kiss that tasted like leftover sex basking in coconut oil lube and the overly sweet cherry tequila monstrosity she had made him drink. It wasn’t good, but for some reason she had to pull herself away so she wouldn’t keep kissing him.

“Bye,” he grunted. 

He let go of her head, and she booked it out of the room at double her normal stride. The last part of her to disappear through the door and into the shower was her purple-spotted bum.

**1.3: T - 74 days, 16 hrs; (08:00)**

“He kissed you?” Catherine squawked in between cackles and mouthfuls of bacon. Shamir just looked annoyed and poked at her omelet. “After you told him to get the fuck out?”

“I was nicer than that. But, yeah.” Byleth used a spoon to test the surface tension of her fried egg.

“How was it?”

“Terrible— you don’t want to kiss someone after fucking all night. Even I think that’s disgusting.”

“You’re blushing.” Shamir said robotically. “Can you at least keep it in your pants at breakfast?” Byleth knew better than to let Shamir’s acerbic morning attitude get under her skin. A little understanding, though, would have been nice.

“I meant the sex.” Catherine said, back on point. “How was the sex?”

“Oh it was...”

 _[figure 1.1]: Initial Chemistry_  
Felix had pinned her against the door and his mouth was against hers, hungry and hot, kissing her while she tugged his hips closer. She had thrown her shoulders back in invitation, and as his hand drifted to brush her breast, she groaned, uncontrolled, while he grinned into her mouth.

 _[figure 1.2]: Careful Application of Practices_  
A constellation of bites and wicked kissing trailed up and down her body marking out the most careful attention anyone had paid to her in years. With her tongue, she had traced the timecone across his pectoral and allowed herself to imagine that all the rest of time was warping and blurring around them. That is, until she had him inside of her, and then she’d stopped thinking altogether.

 _[figure 1.3]: Longitudinal Results_  
She was bossing him around, making sure to wring every orgasm she could from him that night, but Felix was patient. He made her wait for it each time. While she tended to be vocal about her bliss, he communicated his own satisfaction with hair pulling, and her scalp was blessedly aching.

 _[figure 1.4]: Table of Suggestions for Future Research_  
Felix had explored her without shyness, but when it came time for her to explore him, he raged a blush across his entire body. Gentle touches made his eyes close and his breath needy. Then, for all the ferocity of their night lust, he had been shockingly tender once they relaxed into the morning’s first hours: soft kisses on her jaw, hands that held her into sleep.

Byleth crossed her legs under the table. “…You know, I was so drunk I don’t really remember any of it.”

Catherine raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. Bad sign. Byleth wished her extremely loud lab mate would go ahead and nail her to the floor with ridicule. Instead, Catherine flapped a hand in the air for their usual server.

“Hapi!” Cat called so loudly that Byleth clamped her hands over her ears. “This woman needs more coffee.”

“You all look chipper this morning,” Hapi said, eyeballing the table: Shamir grumping into her coffee, Byleth with her head down and ears blocked, Catherine smiling cheerily. They had been regulars at this greasy spoon, Village Coffee, for two years, and they still couldn’t tell when Hapi was joking. It probably didn’t matter because Hapi maintained a consistent hangover, and the only difference between her and Byleth was her ability to function well on it.

“And corn cakes and honey butter, Hapi, I need more food.”

“Right up, Chatterbox.”

“Are you going to be okay going into the lab today?” Cat asked. “Much as I enjoy seeing Rhea chew you out, it seems cruel when you’re this hungover.” Shamir predictably stiffened at Catherine’s mention of Rhea and leaned into her coffee. God, if Cat weren’t so blind, she could have a good thing going, rather than running around as Rhea’s lapdog. But Byleth wasn’t one to talk.

“I’ll be fine,” Byleth said. She could already feel some of the concealer coming off her neck despite having set it for half an hour. “But I do need to stop by the drug store on the way.”

“What for? Our lab has more meds than the pharmacy.”

“I don’t need medicine.” Speaking of which, Byleth dug in her purse for a few more painkillers. “I need another tube of concealer.”

“Oh man,” Catherine guffawed as Byleth’s corncakes made it to the table.

**1.4: T - 74 days, 14 hrs, 30 min; (09:30)**

Catherine was good with tracking space rocks, but otherwise, she was almost perennially wrong about everything. That’s why it sucked so much that her stupid prediction had been on point.

Rhea really had taken Byleth aside as soon as they made it in the door, and, once again, began asking too much of her. It had been happening on a monthly basis lately, and Rhea always seemed pounce after Byleth had been partying.

It didn’t help that Byleth’s routine was predictable:

1\. She was paid the first of the month.  
2\. Rhea set her these absurd objectives at the beginning of every month, due by the end of every month.  
3\. The pressure from those assignments drove Byleth to party away whatever money she had left at the end of the month.  
4\. She got paid, and the cycle continued.

Like self-reacting autocatalysis, the pattern was ingrained in her lifestyle.

“Byleth,” Rhea spoke loftily as if onstage at the community theater rather than the head of a physics lab, “I have a task for you beginning this month.”

Byleth nodded. It’s hard to be a proper suck-up when weighed down by corncakes, eggs, bacon, four cups of coffee, 6 over-the-counter painkillers, a year’s supply of concealer, and the blistering memory of six orgasms the night before. If she wasn’t careful the name Felix would come to the tip of her tongue, and then she’d be really fucked.

“Our new group of post-doc interns are coming in today for pre-orientation. I want you to oversee them, at least until they get on their feet throughout the lab. Talk to them and assess their skills and talents so that we can find the best placement for them.”

Byleth nodded. Of all the days to onboard a bunch of kids fresh out of doctoral programs, this wasn’t ideal. New PHDs were difficult. They would be competitive suck-ups, egos would be running amok, and god forbid they have sex lives. Hopefully they would all be strangers, to each other and to her, that always made things easier.

“A little hair of the dog, Professor?” Manuela asked, coming up behind Byleth at the coffee pot with her customary flask.

“No thanks,” Byleth grunted. Hair of the dog that bit her. He had already left enough of his long black hair on her pillow, thank you very much.

As Byleth turned away from the coffee station, Manuela said, “Oh, professor, you have a little something right there.” A bit of purple bite-mark on her neck where the concealor had rubbed away.

“Thanks,” Byleth used the selfie camera on her phone to assess the damage.

“Oh to be young,” Manuela said, walking away with her doctored up coffee. “Enjoy it. Time is more limited than you know.”

Byleth hastily scrapped together an experience questionnaire for the new kids to fill in their research backgrounds and specialties. In the meantime, Catherine typed into a spreadsheet and shot Byleth a look that could only be interpreted as, _no one had told her they’d be getting fresh meat in today_. Cat was a bit of an attention whore. New kids cramped her style. Byleth shrugged.

“Greetings Professor,” came the perky voice of the buildings receptionist over the lab intercom. “Your post-docs are here. I guess you haven’t met them yet, but they look to me like an interesting bunch. Although, they do seem to be little uptight this morning. I’m sure you’ll be able to sort them out, though.” 

Affectionately called the Gatekeeper, yes their receptionist was always this chatty.

She hit the intercom back, “Send them up, please.”

The group walked in:

A tall blond man (post-doc A) was speaking with a sharp-featured blond woman (post-doc B) who already looked like she took no shit. They were followed by a man with bright red hair and an easy smile (post-doc C) who was walking beside a sour-faced man with a dark ponytail (post-doc OH FUCK NO). Post-doc OH FUCK NO looked familiar. Very very familiar.

Mach Labs, where Byleth worked, was named for the term that represents the velocity of an object relative to the speed of sound. Mach numbers greater than one break the sound barrier. At that moment, the combined vector of Byleth’s heartrate and her zooming panicking mind reached Mach three, supersonic speed. If she hadn’t had a hearty breakfast, she might have collapsed. Puking still wasn’t ruled out.

Oh fuck, not good, not good at all. Byleth’s finger traced a heavily painted-over bite mark near her shoulder.

He unwound a teal scarf from his neck, and she could make out the remnants of a light purple love bite from last night at the hairline. Button down black shirt, teal slacks, and his hair wrapped back in a ponytail, but it was still him alright. He tilted his head just slightly.

The name Felix came to the tip of her tongue. She swallowed hard on it, introduced herself, collected their CVs, and handed them each the experience questionnaire. As they traded papers, Felix’s eyes bored into hers. Three hours ago she had been kicking him out of her bed, now she was welcoming him into her lab. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All quotations are from Carlo Rovelli’s very beautiful _The Order of Time_. Please forgive any errors! I’m not a physicist, just an enthusiastic amateur.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	2. Research Model and Methods

**2\. Research Model and Methods**

_“The ‘quantization’ of time implies that almost all values of time_ t do not exist. _If we could measure the duration of an interval with the most precise clock imaginable, we should find that the time measured takes only certain discrete, special values. It is not possible to think of duration as continuous. We must think of it as discontinuous: not as something that flows uniformly but as something that in a certain sense jumps, kangaroo-like, from one value to another.”_

**2.1: T - 74 days, 11 hrs, 45 min; (12:15)**

Felix should have kept the scarf on. It’s difficult to parse which is worse: being the nerd who wears a scarf all day in the lab or being the guy who shows up to orientation with love bites on his neck.

Sylvain perched beside him at the lunch table and tugged his ponytail. “You have something there on your neck.”

“Let go!” Felix punched Sylvain’s hand away from his hair.

Across the staffroom, Byleth might as well have been in the Andromeda galaxy. But at least she was floating there with the secret knowledge that _her_ hair-tugging and the whisper of her fingernails against Felix’s scalp had managed to pull deep-throated groans from those lips.

Now, though, he just looked rabid.

“Is that a bite mark?” Post-doc C asked, shock rounding out brown eyes that Byleth had noticed winking throughout the entire lab: from his own reflections in glass, to an unamused Shamir, and even the excel spreadsheet Catherine had assigned him. Perhaps, if Byleth knew them better, she would have seen the injustice in Felix being covered in lust-purple marks while playboy Sylvain was flirting with lesbians and spreadsheets.

“You were with a girl? And you didn’t tell me?”

As if she had suddenly developed the long-sought-after secret to teleportation, Byleth was gone from the breakroom in a flash.

“It was last night,” Felix grumbled. “No time.”

“I was wondering about those bags under your eyes. And before a new job? That’s not like you. Must have been something special.” Felix shrugged. “I’m going to need the details! Cup-size? Is she cute? Does she have friends? Are you going to see her again?”

“No.”

From the moment Felix was inside Byleth’s apartment with his mouth pressing hard into hers, the clock began counting down. The problem was, he didn’t know what it was counting down to.

If he had known she would be his boss, he never would have gone home with her. He’s just not that person.

But there’s no moving backward in time. Even worse, quantum time had no backward or forward; it was a series of nows, which is cold comfort the morning after.

“Hey, I have a great idea! I’ll find one too. Then we can double-date.”

Felix’s face made it clear that there was no more unpleasant possibility in the universe than double-dating with Sylvain.

Fortunately, Sylvain might as well have a Ph.D in ignoring Felix’s murdery expressions.

“There are so many hot chicks in our lab it’s dizzying,” he was saying over his sandwich while Felix poked a chicken breast crusted in chili-pepper flakes. “How can anyone focus on research? ‘Don’t go into physics,’ they said, ‘it’s all men and eyesores from here to infinity.’ I don’t think so! The one who’s in charge of us, what’s her name? Professor Eisner—”

“Not her,” Felix grunted.

“What?”

“The Professor, she’s terrible to look at. Her face is extremely unattractive. Those big eyes, disgusting.” Felix mercilessly stabbed his chicken.

“Are you seeing the same person I am?” Sylvain asked, unabashedly glancing over the staffroom where Byleth was re-entering with Shamir and Catherine.

“Yes, and I’m telling you, total hag. She just looks hot because she’s your superior. No need to slum it, Sylvain.”

“If you say so, Fe. I think she has a boyfriend, anyway. I thought I saw a hickey peeking out under her collar.”

Felix choked. His eyes watered with coughing gasps.

“You okay?” Sylvain asked, slapping Felix on the back so hard it made audible thumping sounds. Byleth’s attention drifted over to the spectacle, and Felix kept his burning face turned downward.

“Just a pepper-flake caught in my throat.”

Sylvain looked back at Byleth. Big green eyes, cute minty hair, sexy patterned tights underneath a no-nonsense pencil skirt, and that face serious, unfazed, was enough to drive someone wild. What was Felix talking about?

**2.2: T - 75 days, 2 hrs - (0 < n < 21 days); day(s) n**

Look. That wasn’t the first night Felix had seen Byleth at the Downer laying waste to the idiots at the pool tables. It was just the first time he had been that idiot. If he was honest with himself, he thought that he could take her.

It was the Autumn air, and it was Byleth’s beautiful form, as she laughed after hustling some loser out of fifty bucks, that made him step up to challenge her.

Fall is naturally entropic. It’s a good time to begin something new.

He stirs things up, kicks through orange leaves on the ground, and girds himself with scarves and sweaters. It’s harvest season, it’s decay time: order moves into disorder. Entropy is the kernel of chaos in every calculation, and without it, nothing happens.

Most women weren’t worth Felix’s time. It’s wasn’t them, it was him—he’d heard that somewhere. Byleth, though, was a green-haired menace at the pool tables. She cleaned house, game after game, racking in the five-dollar bills from half-hearted bets, while the losers bought her drinks that she mostly refused.

Listen. That wasn’t the first night he wanted Byleth; it was just the first time he had gotten up the mojo to challenge her.

**2.3: T - 73 days, 15 hrs; (09:00)**

In Newton’s classical mechanics, everything has a direct cause and effect. Reasons aren’t always clear to the naked eye, but nothing happens without them. It’s a good thing Felix didn’t study classical mechanics.

In the quantum universe, laws aren’t so restrictive and clear-cut. Sometimes, events happen seemingly from nowhere, emergent. The reasons aren’t neat and tidy. You can try to boil them down, but they will always be numbers too large to compartmentalize.

Byleth’s hotness was like that. Too large to file away and forget about.

Felix wouldn’t have kissed Byleth in the morning if he hadn’t been hoping to see her again. It wasn’t just that she could go all night and she liked it a little rough. He rarely had good chemistry with people, and never right off the bat. People found him competitive and grating. She hadn’t, though. She had been a boastful little shit, and he was into it.

“Come with me,” Byleth grabbed Felix’s shoulder before he could even put his stuff in his locker and manhandled him into a door he didn’t recognize.

She took a few moments to find the lightswitch while Felix bumped against a shelf that rattled and clinked. “Professor Eisner.” With the lights on, Felix’s voice was so cold he was nearing absolute zero in Kelvin. “What are we doing in the supply closet?”

“I thought we should talk.”

“Is this where you hold meetings?”

Felix had microscopes and flasks at his back and Byleth was standing in front of a shelf full of chemical reactants for testing minerals.

His sarcasm could bite like teeth, but his eyes were looking around, up at the packages of fluorescent tubes, sideways at the extra beakers and radar thermometers. Feeling foolish, she bowed her head only to see him in the most stylish navy-blue shoes a physics post-doc had ever bothered to wear in her lab.

“It seemed convenient,” she said.

“Convenient for what? A morning quickie?”

As soon as he said it, he wished that he hadn’t. They were both thinking about it now. Her eyes: huge. His cheeks: burning.

“Um, no, not that.” Her voice was choked up. “I wanted to make sure that you’re okay with this. Being an intern here after we...”

It was annoying that she couldn’t say the words. He wanted to push her up against the microscopes on the shelf and force her to say each one of them. He wanted to feed the words into her mouth, _we had sex three-plus times back-to-back, front-to-front, my front-to-your-back._ It almost made him smile. He wanted her beautiful face making that O for him, calling out for him.

Fuck, now he was blushing. Fuck, he couldn’t even look at her. _Pull yourself together. You’re not some seventeen-year-old undergrad with a crush on his teacher; you’re a fucking adult and you worked hard to be here._

“…I could have you transferred somewhere if it would make you more comfortable.”

Anger sparked across no less than 20 billion of his 100 billion neurons.

“You want to send me away? Was it that bad?” Her eyes snapped to his, then he looked sideways at the petri dishes. “Nevermind, it doesn’t matter. I came here because I heard this lab is skilled.”

“We have a good reputation.”

“I’m good. I’m really good at what I do. You should let me stay.”

“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t, but I want it to be your choice because I’m not going anywhere.” Again, that competitive snark. He wanted to close his hands around her waist and bury himself in her overinflated ego.

“I won’t sleep with my boss.”

She looked confused. “Did someone come onto you? You can file a complaint with Seteth in HR.”

“What? You! You pushed me into a supply closet.”

“I haven’t been coming onto you. You’re the one who mentioned a quickie.”

“It was sarcasm.” He threw his head back. “What we had—what we did—it’s over. I need to focus. We need to have a purely working relationship now.”

“Yes, of course, it’s over.” Hadn’t she been the one to kick him out of her bed?

His walk-away game was good. It was a sort of pivot on those fashionable shoes to turn toward the door and then a cold saunter off. The parabola bounce of his ponytail rubbed salt into his sword-swipe of a statement: _you can’t have any of this._

One would never have known that reeling through his head like images on a slideshow projector were memories of Byleth’s breasts and his mouth coming to meet them.

**2.4: T - (75 days > n > 60 days); day(s) n**

A List of Unimportant Facts from the Personal Notebook of post-doc OH FUCK NO:

→ This post-doc program doesn’t pay well, but the research is steady.

→ Sylvain’s P.Chem focus has made him Catherine’s bitch. They’re loud together, always cat-calling and joking. She has Sylvain playing with moon rocks. 

→ Sylvain never takes his equipment to the autoclave when he’s done because he’s too busy going up to the bio floor to flirt.

→ Dimitri and Ingrid are in Classical Mechanics paradise with Dr. Seteth. They like their rigid laws and their clockwork universe.

→ How am I the one who already slept with his boss? 

→ Professor Byleth Eisner is one of the least professional people I have ever worked with. I walked over today to ask about a data set and found her staring at a cat picture on her computer for forty minutes. I thought she was reading an article or something. It was a very round cat.

→ I can’t stop thinking about how Professor Eisner is the sort of woman who picks up men at pool halls. Uncertainty principle: the observer is implicated in the calculation, since I am apparently the sort of man who can be picked up at a pool hall.

→ She better not tell anyone.

→ I wasn’t lying about Byleth’s eyes being large. Psychologists have a lot to say about the gravitational attraction of large eyes. Like most physicists, I don’t give a fuck what the psychologists are saying.

→ I’ll stay with the quantum researchers as long as I can, even if it means smelling Byleth’s peppermint shampoo every day.

**2.5: T - 66 days, 22 hrs, 50 min; (01:10)**

“Cat, I have to tell you something,” Across the staffroom, Byleth peered at Felix over the horizon of her sandwich where he was scribbling into a notebook at a table with some of the other interns. If she caught him at just the right angle, would she suddenly realize he had been a doppelgänger all along? Perhaps there was still hope that this was all a silly mistake. “But you can’t tell anyone.”

“Not Rhea?”

Byleth wanted to slap her. “No way not Rhea.”

Catherine cackled. It had to be an empty threat. Catherine was the sort of person who wants to be told things, so betrayal was shooting herself in the foot.

“What about Shamir?”

Byleth thought on it for a second. “Yeah, you can tell Shamir.” For real, who’s Shamir gonna tell? Catherine? Byleth was briefly lost imagining the feedback loop of the same tired gossip, because Shamir had no imagination and Catherine spent most of hers running through half-relevant jokes like an algorithm.

“Hey! Earth to Byleth, what is it you wanted to tell me?”

“That guy from last week. The one who was good in bed—”

“So now we’re admitting that he was good!” Catherine wiggled her eyebrows. She wanted details. She’d never been with a man and never wanted to, but it didn’t stop her from having a comedic fixation on penises.

“That’s him over there.”

“You’re just now telling me?!” Catherine did a full 180-degree torso spin to get a good look. There’s no way anyone in the breakroom would fail to notice her checking out the intern table. Byleth wanted to bury her face in her sandwich. She bit off a mouthful instead.

Maybe Manuela’s right about this whole spiking her coffee thing. After taking a look at her life choices, a 9 am shot of whiskey seemed like a damn good life hack.

“The grumpy one with the ponytail? He’s cute. A little short, though.” No, the rest of the interns were just stupidly tall.

“How did you know which one?”

“He’s the only one scowling back at us like he knows exactly what we’re talking about.” Sure enough, Felix was glaring across the staffroom at the two of them. Could Catherine be any louder?

“Fuck me,” Byleth groaned into her empty hands. Where had her sandwich gone? Oh yeah, she devoured it.

“As I recall, he already did.” Catherine laughed. Byleth sunk in her seat. “I can’t believe that’s the guy with the suction-cup stamina to leave behind all those marks. Surly motherfucker, I haven’t seen him open his mouth once since he’s been here, and you’re telling me he opened it wide enough to leave hickeys the size of moon craters on your neck?”

 _That and then some_ , Byleth thought.

“He must really love you.” She was teasing. Byleth was half-sure Catherine was one of those scientific nihilists who didn’t believe in love, only brain chemicals and delusions. The evidence of love, of course, stared her in the face every day. All she had to do was look at Shamir.

But it did suck that Catherine could tease about love, and it sky-rocketed the frequency of Byleth’s heartbeat.

“Shut up, Cat.”

**2.6: T - 61 days, 15 hrs, 15 min; (08:45)**

Byleth raised Manuela’s flask to her mouth, metal and whiskey. She had a presentation to give that day and greasing the wheels of her normally reluctant chatterbox wouldn’t hurt. 

“I’m just … restless.” She said when Manuela asked her what was wrong for the sixth time.

“It’s your biological clock ticking.”

Byleth rolled her eyes and Catherine showed up to the watering hole. “Actually, I have a cat,” Byleth said. “So I’m good on that.” She really did. He was gray and fluffy and had little white boots.

Manuela sprinkled the remaining whiskey into her coffee.

“Good morning, Sunshine!” Catherine called as she poured her coffee.

Byleth shook her head. Placebo effect or not, hair of the dog only works if you had gotten drunk enough for a righteously terrible headache after some bone-satisfyingly good sex. She had neither qualification that morning, so this was more accurately classified as border-line alcoholism.

A black pony-tail walked by, arms full of papers that still smelled like copier toner. Fuck. She’s having Felix-thoughts again.

“Cats don’t satisfy everything,” Manuela said cheekily before turning and walking away. Byleth glared daggers into her back.

“What’s was that all about?” Catherine asked wrinkling her nose. Byleth suspected she was taking offense to Manuela’s disparaging of ‘cats’.

“She thinks I want a baby.”

“Oh no, By, babies are—”

“Career suicide, I know.” And so was sleeping with interns.

Byleth pretended not to see Felix watching them from the open doorway of the glass-walled library while Ingrid poked him with her pencil to pay attention to what she was saying.

“Want to run spreadsheets in Lab C this morning?” Lab C was an experimental lightroom. Half of it was full of flickering light tubes that made it look like something off a zombie morgue movie, and the other half was lit by LEDs of strange colors across the spectrum, which was a whole ‘nother kind of ghoulish. No one went in there, and that made it Byleth’s favorite.

“Can’t, I have to meet with Rhea.” Byleth flicked her wrist and made a sound like a whip-crack. “Yeah yeah yeah, I’m whipped. Look, Rhea’s just my work wife.”

“Rhea’s a work grandma. She might be hot on the outside, but we can carbon-date her soul back to the Big Bang. You can do better.”

“Oh really, can I?”

Byleth looked meaningfully at Shamir who was making a cute grimace at her desk while wrangling a dataset. Feeling their eyes on her, she looked up and scowled. Cat grinned and waved her friend over.

“Shamir, do you want to get sushi tonight?”

Shamir gave Catherine a suspicious look. “I have a lot to do in the lab.” Catherine’s crest-fallen expression could have won her an Oscar. “But I suppose I can spare some time.”

“It’s a date then!”

“A—a date?” 

“I’ll put in earrings. Buy you flowers. Pick you up at 8?”

“I guess that’s okay.” Shamir’s tiny smile was enough to make even Byleth’s day. She tried not to glance over at Felix and failed.

“Are they allowed to date?” Felix asked Ingrid, not having listened to a word she was saying about Dr. Seteth’s theories on fluid dynamics and flying.

“Of course they are. They’re peers, they have separate contracts, no hierarchical problems. I can’t see anything wrong with it. I personally would never get involved in a lab romance, though. It’s risky.”

**2.7: T - (66 days > n > 54 days); day(s) n**

A note on the velocity of rumors:

Word travels fast, Mach 6 or above. Because rumors are more than sound. They are text snippets carried across radio frequencies. They are too many meaningful glances shot across the room.

Catherine didn’t keep Byleth’s love life to herself. She told Shamir who told no one because Shamir is dependable. 

However, post-doc C was in the vicinity (the one with the red hair). And he managed to tell the bio department upstairs before post-doc OH FUCK NO put a stop to it by threatening to murder him in his sleep. But the damage was already done. The bio department told the chem department. And from chemistry, it came full-circle back to physics.

Seteth took Byleth aside to tell her how inappropriate she was being. If she hadn’t just won a large research grant for the lab and didn’t have a rock-solid contract, she would be on probation. It didn’t make Seteth’s mood any better when Byleth reminded him that male professors got away with it all the time.

Seteth went so far as to imply how suspicious it was that Felix had latched onto Byleth’s research. Byleth put her foot down: would Seteth sabotage Felix’s career by taking him off good research?

**2.8: T - 52 days, 11 hrs, 20 min; (12:40)**

The entire lab was buzzing with Rhea’s new announcement. They were hiring! The position was for a long-term junior researcher, all coming from the grant money brought in by Byleth’s research.

Byleth wondered who among the potential internal hires she would be willing to have as a long term lab partner. She thought she might know the answer.

Her salmon was getting cold as she wrapped herself in Felix-thoughts.

She imagined his Felix’s mouth moving against her hip. Eyes, sunset dark, and the smell of smoke lingering from the Downer, while her fingers traced his abs before she followed with her mouth to lick each one. She thought of his hands clawed in her hair to pull and direct her head as she inched her way down on him. The taught skin of his dick already tasted like coconuts from the lube, and he wanted to cradle her head gently but he couldn’t help thrusting with her, as she wrapped him in deeper than she had taken anything before.

It was just the tequila; she was sure of it. The tequila numbed her gag reflex. The tequila made her all soppy-eyed when she looked up at him, some bit of his salty spunk dribbling at the corner of her mouth. And she wiped it away because this sex wasn’t about creating new cosmos. It was about tequila and the thrill of victory at pool, and the sexy way Felix’s mouth fell open, his brain buzzed and satisfied, and his hand lazily draping across her body before pulling her up to him. Because he might have been momentarily spent but he wasn’t done playing with her…

A bagged lunch comes down on the table across from her.

“Daydreaming?” Felix asked. The real Felix, not the sex god she caged up in her mind. Byleth’s whole face blushed scarlet and she poked at the baked potato on her plate, slicing her fork unnecessarily through its skin.

“What are you doing here?”

“Joining you for lunch. I like seeing how quickly and how much you can put away. Your velocity of food into mouth is unmatched.” She scowled into his smirk before looking away. “What were you thinking about, anyway?”

Oh, just cramming other things into her mouth.

That’s the thing about physicists, they couldn’t stop being curious even with the stuff they didn’t want to know.

“You know they think there might be squids or some kind of cephalopod sea-monster in the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa?”

He squinted at her. “It would be frozen, end of story.”

“No, the acting theory is that Jupiter’s gravitational pull is so strong its friction heats the moon and causes actual water oceans beneath the ice.”

“That’s not what you were thinking about.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “Anyway, I have a request.”

“You’re asking me for help? That’s unusual.”

“Maybe. I want a position here, and I’m the best intern for your research.”

This was corruption, wasn’t it? This was why there were rules about not sleeping with subordinates. Favors and promotions.

Felix’s eyes flickered wide. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not like that. What I’m asking is to be in on your research all the way. Don’t act like you couldn’t use a hand. I’ve seen your notes.”

“Why my research?”

“It intrigues me.”

She tried to eat slowly while thinking. One potato chip at a time, wiping her fingers on a napkin between each one.

“Okay, get your inbox ready, I’m about to share a lot of files.”

“You know,” he said slowly. “If I get a better contract here, I’ll be your peer.”

“Already trying to beat me at my own research?”

He smirked. That wasn’t what he meant. But would he like Byleth so much if competition weren’t the first thing on her mind?

**2.9: T - 47 days, 50 min; (23:10)**

At the Downer, their eyes met across two pool tables. Felix sank his shot. Byleth sank hers. They’re good, they’re both very good. It’s a shame that they aren’t playing the same game.

The girl that Felix was playing against looked familiar. Byleth might have remembered seeing her in the chem lab downstairs. Curvaceous, deep green eyes, long chestnut hair. Byleth didn’t understand why but her throat went dry watching them. 

The man that she was playing against that night was kind of a tool, a beautiful tool, and she knew just how she was going to use him. He had lavender hair and a wicked smile. She was almost sure he only came out at night.

Felix intercepted her on the way to the bathroom, lines forming between russet eyes. “Are you going to take that guy home?”

“The more I drink, the higher that probability rises.”

“Is that how it was with us?”

“Wasn’t it?”

He put his knuckle against her jaw and drew it down toward her chin. For a moment, she thought he would tip her head up and kiss her. For a moment, they weren’t Professor Byleth and Dr. Fraldarius, two colleagues. For a moment, they are just a man and a woman in a pool hall who slept together once and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

She was moving her head closer to his. He was the only mistake worth making and they wanted this so bad.

“How easy this would all be if you were indifferent to me.”

She snapped out of it. She pulled herself back. A drunken kiss in a bar wasn’t worth either or both of their careers.

“If you weren’t my subordinate, I would...”

“Then promote me. Get me a contract. Make me not your subordinate.”

She looked stricken, and he realized he had said the wrong thing. Her eyes were hurt and every guard went up around her. “Now it sounds like you’re using me again.”

“Byleth, I—”

“Goodnight, Dr. Fraldarius.”

Yuri went home with Byleth. They had boring sex. She almost called him Felix, but it would have been an insult to the word. Felix is not a variable she can place anywhere. Felix is a constant. He’s just not her constant. Yuri left before the clock struck three.

Dorothea took Felix home. They were fooling around, and Felix tried looking into her green eyes and imagining that they were Byleth’s. Dorothea took that as enthusiasm, so she was surprised when he pulled away.

He told her he’s not that into her. He used the cliche lines he heard in movies. She understood; she’d watched all those films too.

He told her there’s someone else but it’s complicated. _She thinks I’m using her to be promoted._

She hugged him, sisterly and chaste. _Are you?_

It’s not like Dorothea had wanted a relationship, anyway. _No, I’m using the promotion to be with her._

They promised to never talk about it again. _So show her that._

He slept on the couch.

**2.10: T - 46 days, ???; (??:??)**

Byleth was hungover. She lost an entire day. There was a missed call from Felix on her phone but no message.

**2.11: T - 35 days, 4 hrs, 45 min; (19:15)**

The hours of calculations ticked by, periodically punctuated when one of them would run their hands through their hair. Felix would strike a differential across his paper before clawing some corvid blue hair back from his neck. Byleth would swirl her integrals and brush hers backward, showering her shoulders in green locks and the smell of peppermint.

Slowly and meticulously, they were unwinding the nature of time. The later it was getting, the more it was looking like their tests might be successful. They could both use a win.

She grabbed a dataset from the table and her hand brushed his. He didn’t startle and his hand remained out. He looked at her from below hair made a rich deep blue by the cool spectrum of the fluorescent lights. _As long as there’s no tequila around_ , she thought, _we will be fine_. It was the tequila that made them act that way.

They worked quietly, trading calculations for the other to check. She wrote in green pen; he wrote in blue. They inscribed cosmic questions on pads of paper. As humans, they were aware of being mere events, just passing by. Their papers will continue, though, bridging the individual points of time, until they are destroyed.

Byleth shivered. It was always cold in the lab, particularly in the Fall and Winter. Cold helps the brain think, and it elongates the circadian rhythm or something like that. You’d have to ask the biologists.

Byleth had, in the past, shored up sweaters and blankets at her desk to keep warm, but they were still at home for cleaning. She pulled her long sleeves further down her hands as if covering her wrists would solve the issue.

Felix looked at her, his face inscrutable. He stood and walked away. Maybe he had just remembered something. That’s the thing about researchers, you don’t interrupt the process.

Then, she heard a click and a gurgle that she knew well from hundreds of mornings in the lab. He had put the electric kettle on to heat water. When he came back, he was carrying his teal peacoat and steaming hot tea in her Schrodinger’s Cat comic mug. Without a word, he placed the tea at her elbow and the coat around her shoulders, then he settled back in next to her. The warmth was immediate.

Maybe she had miscalculated. Maybe it wasn’t only the tequila that had made them act that way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. Analysis and Results

**3\. Analysis and Results**

_“The entire coming into being of the cosmos is a gradual process of disordering, like the pack of cards that begins in order and then becomes disordered through shuffling. There are no immense hands that shuffle the universe. It does this by mixing itself, in the interactions among its parts that open and close during the course of the mixing, step by step. … What causes events to happen in the world, what writes its history, is the irresistible mixing of all things, going from the few ordered configurations to the countless disordered ones.”_

**3.1: T - 27 days, 4 hours; (20:00)**

Felix struck a spiky QED at the bottom of the paper and stretched his arms above his head, his knit black turtleneck pulling tight across his chest. Yawning, he took his hair down and wafted pine-scented shampoo throughout the library. As his fingers started working to put the hair back up, he tilted his head; Byleth was staring at him. Mouth slightly open, biting the corner of her lip, she might have been drooling over a steaming, delicious plate of—

She grabbed his paper to drag it across the table. Felix’s calculus was beautiful, better than his geometry if you accounted for his pool playing. It scrolled across her pages and proved her theorems. Most of the time, Byleth didn’t need to check it. She did anyway, reading it like a novel full of spiked handwriting that could warp a mechanical world into fractal complexity.

“Long day,” Felix groaned “I’m glad we stuck with it, though.”

“It’s late. You can go if you want.” She leaned her head back into his coat, wrapped around her as per their unspoken evening arrangement.

“Tch, I’m not leaving if you’re still working.”

She forced her mind back in between the numbers.

Calculus is a language developed to talk about time. Other languages have words, and words are cool if you’re into that touchy-feely stuff. Only mathematics, though, can truly express duration.

Try it. Talk about time and you’ll land on asymptotic metaphors, glancing off what you mean. Like geometry, language defaults to the merely spatial:

 _[example 3.1]_  
Time has moved _forward_ since Felix’s tongue first traced the top of Byleth’s soft palate. In their wishful thinking, time moves _backward_ toward her hand unzipping his jeans.

 _[example 3.2]_  
It trickles _by_ like a lazy creek whenever they sit in separate homes, enduring forced idleness at night, brains exhausted and bodies restless. Time feels _long_ when Byleth waits for Felix to join her at lunch, or it comes _short_ when he hands her coffee and the tips of their fingers touch.

 _[example 3.3]_  
While they work, time _passes_ quickly—Through what? Through space? But was it really _passing quickly_? Because it felt like it was taking for-fucking-ever.

Okay, that’s enough.

She stood and shuffled papers, “You’re doing a great job.”

“Of course I am.”

“Thank you for all of your work.” She held her hand out for a professional shake.

He narrowed his eyes. _Really, Byleth, a handshake?_

He left her hanging.

Her hand wobbled in the air.

She blushed and put it down. “Let’s scan in these calculations. They aren’t quite getting us where we want to go, but they’re good.”

Felix bit his tongue on _too easy_ ’s and _why am I even here?_ ’s and all the other remarks that came so bitingly when he was tired. Instead, he asked the taboo, “Where do we want to go?”

She didn’t know what to say. Lab C was a good option. No one would interrupt them there if he didn’t mind getting freaky to zombie morgue lights and the LED rainbow. But at this time of night, they could do it just about anywhere…

She shook her head. Wait, no! That’s not what he was asking (probably).

Some researchers knew exactly where all their calculations were heading and what conclusions they wanted to draw. They were the lucky ones. Right then, she didn’t feel so lucky.

 _[example 3.4]_  
 _Where_ does time go when you spend whole hours thinking about the possible applications of your lab partner’s mouth?

Byleth made a mental note to ask Shamir.

**3.2: T - 14 days, 14 hours, 30 min; (09:30)**

According to the Letter of Recommendation on file for Dr. Felix Hugo Fraldarius from Prof. Byleth Eisner—

  
Things that had nothing to do with Felix’s hiring decision:

a) His pool game, which was improving.

b) His physics-inspired tattoos, which demonstrated his enthusiasm for the subject material, even when his attitude was somewhat less amiable than desired.

c) His stupidly long eyelashes or his amber eyes that seemed to shoot sparks whenever he looked at her.

d) How eye-contact with Felix was almost tangibly erotic, leaving them both feeling naked and stripped down. 

e) How sometimes when he caught her looking at him, he didn’t scowl at her as he did with other people. Sometimes, he smiled, crooked and just at the corners of his mouth.

f) Watching his hands move while he wrote, also almost tangibly erotic.

  
Things that had everything to do with Felix’s hiring decision:

1) Over-the-top work ethic that had him working late, studying all the time, and never sitting idle. Just the sort of person a busy lab likes to exploit.

2) Strong grasp of concepts and overall research brilliance. Strong affinity for the lab research, particularly that of Prof. Byleth Eisner.

3) A desire to prove himself.

4) The ability to compartmentalize personal-life and work-life.  
  


That last one was a stretch, but Felix got the job.

Everyone talks about how ugly quantum theories are. The numbers are too big, and it would be nice if they factored down into small tidy digits. Quantum is also difficult to explain to laymen: particles are untenable and relativity cuts deeper than the clockwork universe.

Tell a person that they have no free will and many will settle into it. Tell them, on the other hand, that they do have free will—though, it’s constrained by a complex relationship with chaos and evolution—and that there is no overarching narrative, or even an overarching timeline, that ties all the events of the universe together, and they tend to have existential crises for some reason.

Somehow, Byleth and Felix thrived in exactly that kind of mercenary world.

In the search to make quantum cleaner and more beautiful, labs spend disgusting sums of research dollars to prove abstract theories. As far as Byleth was concerned, the only grant dollars well-spent were the ones that allowed her to hire Felix.

**3.3: T - 9 days, 16 hours; (08:00)**

Byleth sealed Felix’s contract offer herself. When she handed it to him, he put out his hand to shake.

She didn’t bother with it.

She wrapped her arms around his back and drew him against her chest. Trapped between them, his hands struggled to break free before they could rest, a bird’s weight, on her shoulders to complete the hug. Amber eyes winged large over her shoulder, as her hair floated against his pink-tinged cheek.

“Congratulations,” she said close to his jaw. Felix had never thought about their height difference before. It was nice. “You earned this.”

To someone with a high emotional intelligence, she might as well have been saying, _I love you_. However, considering they both had the emotional intelligence of two battle robots in an arena, all she thought she meant was ‘ _you make an excellent colleague, Dr. Fraldarius_ ’ and all he heard was ‘ _let’s bone_ ’.

How long is too long for a work-appropriate hug? He had recovered from his shock and his face was slowly curving down toward hers. She counted to five and pulled away. If he was a missile and she the target, his timing was still kilometers off.

**3.4: T - 8 days, 7 hours, 15 min; (16:45)**

Sylvain was lounging alone in the breakroom when Byleth came through to grab an extra sweater from her locker.

“Hello, Professor Eisner. You’re looking cute today. Is that a new sweater?”

“No. Just the first time I’m wearing it this season. What are you up to post-doc C—I mean, Dr. Gautier?”

“Please, just call me Sylvain.” He brushed back some of his hair and fixed Byleth with a sharp look. “I wanted to check in with you.”

“I barely know you.”

“Still, I’ve noticed you put in long hours at the lab. Everybody around here works so hard.” When she only nodded, he added, “Do you ever get lonely?”

“No, I have a cat.” Byleth opened the wooden-laminate door of her locker to photo of a grey cat with a white chest and a very circular body as if he had been rolling around through space in his own gravitational field for years.

“Now that’s funny. You know who likes cats? My buddy Felix. You know Felix, right?”

“Of course.”

“Right, you just got him a pretty sweet contract.” Byleth closed her locker and watched Sylvain warily. “I’ve known Felix since we were young. Our dads were friends, both scientists. I wanted to go into applied physics, but Felix wouldn’t be deterred from theoretical. Like Glenn,” he added as an afterthought.

“Who’s Glenn?”

“Felix’s late brother. He passed away a while back. So here we are.” Sylvain’s eyes were sober now, begging her to grasp what he was laying down. “He’ll never say it, but he never passes up an opportunity to sit beside a cat.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Doesn’t he seem like the sort of person you want to bring home to your cat?”

“Dr. Gautier—”

“I’m joking, I’m joking.” He wasn’t joking. “Just try calling him when you’re not working. I guarantee he’ll answer.” Sylvain waved her on. “Have a nice day, Professor.”

As Byleth walked out of the staffroom, she passed Felix dressed in his tight black turtleneck with his hair high in a bun. He raised his hand in a stiff wave. Byleth’s nod was curt as she darted to lock herself in Lab C.

In her mind,  
she was backing him into the supply closet and locking the door. They would find themselves in the narrow alley of tools wrapped in autoclave bags and fragile glass instruments, as she dropped to her knees in front of him and pressed her face into his teal slacks.

She would take his zipper between her teeth, slowly dragging it down to reveal him straining and desperate for her with each unzipped tooth, until she could shove the pants down and run her tongue over his flushed penis. She would cup his balls in her hand, and he would groan and dig his fingers into her hair until he was tugging at her to get going, go harder.

He liked it ridging against the top of her mouth, continuous, unrelenting. He liked when she made noise. Stiff knees blissfully counterpointing the burning in her lungs, as she would breathe rough puffing through her nose, grab his bone-white hips, and push him against the back of her throat...

**3.5: T = DNE; (does not exist)**

Felix likes the way Byleth snuggles into his teal coat, as if out of all her vast knowledge, she simply doesn’t realize how inappropriate that is. The coat smells like her peppermint shampoo with a hint of that slightly powdery perfume he made Ingrid ask her about, fig blossoms. Even a year ago, mint and figs would not have been on the bingo card that Felix would have used to guess his ideal woman, and yet here he is. Entropy works in mysterious ways.

Shirtless and cursing the Autumn’s cold morning, damp air making him shiver alone in bed, he grabs the coat from where he draped it over the desk chair last night and wraps himself into it. There’s Byleth, the way she smells powdery, fresh, not too sweet. With the coat around his shoulders, he holds himself and his hands wrap around to touch his skin like he wished she would touch every part of him.

It helps with the warmth, his body falls back, muscles relaxing against the headboard of his single bed. He moves his hands down his own stomach. Feeling himself the way she would feel him, playing with his hips the way she did that night. By the time his hand makes it to his dick, he’s already hard, curving upward against his hip.

He spreads his legs, tries to tease himself. He trails his fingers softly along the shaft, plays under the head. It’s no good; there’s no fooling his brain, which knows exactly what he’s doing. So he goes hard into one hand while the other wraps himself according to his fantasy.

He imagines his face inches from sinking between Byleth’s breasts, his fingers arcing to press a nipple hard enough to make her gasp and start to pant. He imagines her hair falling soft and sweet-mint green around her shoulders, down her clavicle, between those breasts. Turn it up a notch, faster; he imagines her humping his brains loose, hips grinding his. The first sign of cum trickles down the side of the head and sears his hand.

He’s not remotely ashamed when he puts his hand on the imaginary Byleth’s shoulder, and she knows just what to do wrapping him in her mouth, her nose dropping into the curling hair at the base, as her green waves fall across his stomach.

He comes, crashing against himself, feverish. Behind his eyes, everything goes crimson and then burns into a red nebula.

He’s shot across his stomach, up toward his collar. He lies that way for a moment, ravaged skin flushing against the teal coat, dark hair fanning out on his pillow.

A speck gets on the coat. He cleans himself up, grabs a wet rag, carefully wipes it down.

His phone has fallen out of the coat pocket. Byleth is just a phone call away. Byleth might as well be light-years away.

**3.6: T - 5 days, 22 hours; (02:00)**

The ecologists on the third floor once gave a presentation on how bees express temporal duration by dancing. As if that’s something to be proud of. Humans express it all the time; they have clocks and they complain a lot.

It was ten weeks since they fucked and it was two in the morning when Byleth called Felix to talk about nothing. He answered the second ring, and it didn’t surprise her that he was a night owl too.

“Byleth?” His voice was sleepy, thick, like when he said ‘bye’ that morning ten weeks ago.

“Do you ever think about what we do? How people think it’s so insignificant. Particles, entanglement, magnetic fields, gravitation. It’s all so arcane none of it really enters most people’s daily lives. Sometimes I feel almost... superfluous.”

There was a hitch in breath and movement across the radio waves that connected her phone to his. “Often,” he said. “I often think of it.” The clarity of his tone told her that he was sitting up now.

“But I care about it so much.”

“I can understand that.”

“I keep thinking of gravity, and time, and string. I mean we’re always hearing about String Theory in the abstract but do you ever imagine it? Connecting the world around us, rerouting chaos just enough that maybe sometimes good things happen. I think of strings that look glossy and dark, blue-black tendrils moving in space and binding us together. They would be soft when I brush my hand through it and they smell like pine trees...”

“Byleth…”

“I’m sorry. I must sound delirious.”

His hand traveled to his hair, quietly stroking it the way she wanted to. “Strings, huh? To me, they’re light green, and uh… they’re fresh, like peppermint. And yes, I think about digging my hands into strings sometimes.”

They breathe separate rhythms as the phone picks up their exhales. One and then the other. The brain learns by analyzing patterns of cause and effect over brief periods of time.

The period between their breathing is close, and they are learning. One a cause and the other an effect. One an effect and the other a cause. Something emergent this way comes.

“Byleth, are you there?”

Of course she was there, he could hear her breathing.

“Yes.”

“What are you thinking about?”

She wanted him back in her space. She wanted that insane all-focused, no-thoughts-in-head feeling that he had given her when they had first stepped through the door of her apartment and he had pressed against her. She wanted his hands in her hair, her hands in his hair, for everything to escalate from brushing to tugging and then pulling and then panting. And then they wouldn’t have to talk about String Theory anymore and they wouldn’t need to mask how they felt.

“Uh, just cephalopods, you know.”

“Right, the space squids on Jupiter’s moon.”

“That’s all that’s going through my mind right now.”

Emergent processes are tricky to model because sometimes they just seem to happen. There’s a chaos point that sends the autocatalysis into motion. We’ll call the chaos point ‘tequila’.

At the point of ‘tequila’, the events swerve from their prior predictable patterns. Consider an ecosystem. When part of it disengages or collapses, the entire ecosystem is thrown out of balance. Partnerships are like that, thriving off feedback. It takes the unpredictable ‘tequila’ points for both actors to change and grow.

They fell asleep together on the phone. It took 2 hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds before the call was dropped.

Felix dreamed of Byleth’s lips, the way they had once parted for him, the way she bit her lip when she was coming, the way that even now as his reserved lab mate, she would use them to say the most miraculous things. He dreamed of her hair, of her String Theory desires, of the green pen she used for her calculations, symbols running across the page in more green strands.

**3.7: T - 3 days, 13 hours; (11:00)**

“Professor Eisner,” Felix said walking up to the lunch table she was sharing with Shamir and Catherine. “Here, take it. I’ve printed a copy of that plasma physics article on shear flow in 3D microgravity conditions that I was talking about. The one using laser manipulation.”

She dropped her sandwich, already half-eaten in the first two minutes of her lunch break, and reached for the article. “That sounds so good, Dr. Fraldarius. I’m really looking forward to looking this over.”

“Let me know what you think of it.” Their fingertips brushed near to the staple. Felix looked quickly into her eyes and then away. “There’s at least one method I think we can apply to our research.”

“I certainly will, thank you,” Byleth said, swallowing hard as Felix turned and walked out of the breakroom.

Catherine and Shamir shared an expression, mouths slightly open.

“What’s wrong with you two?”

“That was the dirtiest way I’ve ever heard anyone talk about laser manipulation.” Catherine whistled and turned her eyes back down to her soup.

“Cat,” Shamir said mechanically, “I’m going to need you to meet me in Lab C, ASAP. We can skip the foreplay ‘cause that was it.”

“What? What did he say?”

“The way he drew out _manipulation_. By, he wants your manipulation all over him.” She made a jerking-off gesture in the air.

“That’s not even clever, Cat,” Byleth retorted. “If anyone’s doing sophisticated _manipulation_ in bed, it’ll be him.” Both of their mouths dropped open at her again. “Shit. Shit,” she muttered, picking up her sandwich.

“Look, By, It’s not what he said.”

Shamir added, “It’s how he said it. Are you sure he’s not mistaking lasers for his dick?”

Byleth rolled her eyes. As far as she was concerned, ‘subtext’ was nothing more than a font choice in the word processor when prepping an article for publication.

“And you, ‘really looking forward to looking this over.’ That paper looks dull as shit. There are five pages straight of proofs. Yeah, I watched you flip through it.”

“The only thing you’re looking forward to looking over is that man in your bed.”

“Shit, why wait for bed?” Catherine grinned as Byleth realized she had panic-eaten her whole sandwich and was holding air between her hands. “You guys just need to find a lab and bang it out.”

“You’re so romantic,” came Shamir’s sardony as she swiped Cat a side-eye.

“I try,” Catherine purred. Byleth thought she might hurl.

“You guys leave Lab C alone! That’s my safe space.”

“Only if you and laser dick can beat us there.”

“Oh, fuck no,” Byleth buried her head in her hands. Between her elbows, the undoubtedly boring plasma physics article suddenly seemed so incriminating and dirty she couldn’t even look at it.

Lab romances were a stupid idea. Byleth watched Shamir and Catherine navigate the new territory. More bickering, but also more smiling. They had nicknamed Sylvain ‘the puppy,’ and they were constantly trying to tear him in half with their research needs while they went off to secluded labs.

They weren’t subtle; this is Catherine we’re talking about. Byleth kept a secret tally of the number of times she walked in on them making out in various empty rooms.

Sitting down beside her in the library, Felix noticed the tally. “‘The Clandestine Escapades of CathMir’,” he read in that cool tone that could always throw her off balance. “Five times by the particle accelerator. That’s impressive. And they must really like the observatory.”

He raised his eyebrows as she blushed and hastily shut the notebook.

“You’re that interested in your friends’ sex lives?”

“Just living vicariously,” she grumbled.

“Why? You seem to have no difficulty picking up men.”

She swallowed all the thirst-words off the tip of her tongue. “Lots of long nights in the lab.”

“That cat of yours must be lonely.” He waited, his gaze shifting sideways to look at her. “How come I didn’t meet him?”

“He’s shy.” Byleth sat quietly. Then, as if suddenly discovering subtext, she found more words. “He’s shy and he has difficulty expressing himself. You might find this surprising, but he doesn’t have men over that often. Just sometimes when things feel really— _really good_.” 

“I understand.”

“I bet he’d like you, though. I bet he’d really like you if you came back over.”

“We’re still talking about your cat, right?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Byleth went back to editing a printout. Felix dug his face into a book. They worked silently for a few minutes before Felix poked his head up.

“Do you think your cat would like it if I stayed the night?” he asked. “Or would your cat try to kick me out in the morning?”

“I think he’d let you stick around until you wanted to leave.”

A person’s research says a lot about them. Like with any line of work, it’s where they dedicate their hours. Byleth’s research is the only one Felix deigns to work on.

He doesn’t envy Sylvain who’s stuck with space rocks, or Ingrid and Dimitri who calculate Seteth’s classical mechanics. He and Byleth talk about entropy, the way that disorder gives us new life.

If Byleth’s mind is anything like her research, it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever come into contact with. Of course he would want to stick around. Every discrete moment that they spent together, every granule in the hourglass is much better than anything he had been doing before.

**3.8: T - 2 days, 7 hours, 45 min; (16:15)**

“Dr. Fraldarius, get over here.”

Felix gritted his teeth into the lab room with the flickering lights. Catherine was looking down into a half-edited grant application and leaning against a desk, while Shamir sat above reading an article on her tablet about solar energy receivers for sail-like spacecraft.

“We wanted to congratulate you. Looks like we’ll be seeing you around a lot now.”

Felix nodded.

“Congratulations,” Shamir said. “Another theorist, just what this lab needs.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course you’re a junior researcher and Byleth’s research is where the money came from, so you’ll be working with her, right?”

“So far, yes.”

“Byleth’s fun to be around. Let me give you a tip, she’s really good at pool. Her dad taught her. He’s not around anymore, but boy does she live up to his legacy. Do you shoot pool?”

“I did some in college.”

“Really? That’s not what I heard,” Shamir said. Out of the corner of his eye, he barely caught Cat making a juvenile gesture with her pointer and thumb finger forming a circle and the other pointer poking through it.

Haha, funny. Pool cues shooting balls as a metaphor for sex. He wished Byleth was there to scold them about the low-hanging fruit. Fuck, low-hanging fruit?

“He’s blushing,” Catherine whispered.

Was this hazing? Harassment maybe?

“Look, research is all fine and good,” Shamir added. “But you theoretical types take it too far.”

“She uses pool to blow off some steam. Maybe you need to blow off steam too.” Catherine wiggled her eyebrows. “She rarely says ‘no’ to a direct challenge.”

Felix darted from the lab and walked past Byleth working at her desk. She raised her hand, a small smile on her face. He nodded and rushed into the lab library.

In his mind,  
he was crawling below Byleth’s desk as she worked. Daring her not to make a sound, he would draw his arms around the back of her hips and pull her forward in her seat.

He wouldn’t give a fuck how mangled her tights would get, as he hiked up her skirt and dragged them down her legs. He would press jagged kisses in her thighs, biting and then sucking the soft inner skin until she would almost whimper and try to press her legs together, so that he would have to hold them open as he looked up at her, insolent eyes daring her to break her poker face.

His fingers would curl into her, first one, and then a second because she was so ready, and his mouth would breathe hot air against her nerve endings so that her legs would shudder on either side of him. Tongue licking around almost sweetly before he started to suck on her nerves, and her eyes would go wide in epiphany while her hand dropped below the desk, clawing and caressing him and begging for release... 

**3.9: T = an illusion**

Byleth has nothing that belongs to Felix in her room unless she wants to fantasize about his handwriting on a page of her notes. She wouldn’t put it past herself.

She had cleaned up his hair the moment she got home from work that first evening ten weeks ago because she’s not a serial killer who collects the hair of her lovers. And she’s washed the sheets at least seven times since then.

Byleth has nothing of Felix except in space-time. In space-time, he’s all over her apartment. She had him in her living room, learning how to kiss her, hungry needy kisses that fought like rivals simply for the thrill.

That’s good, her legs feel the thrill now, she is prickling, her body begins to hum. Heartbeat rising, warmth filling her stomach and chest.

She remembers him on the stairs, the space too small for the kind of tango their bodies automatically wanted to do. Every movement crashed them together. Legs straddling legs. Her fingers in his hair, accidentally pulling too hard. His growl as he pushed a desperate boner against her.

Byleth’s hands move from pinching her nipples to grabbing her own hips. Then, shyness abandoned, she uses one hand to work inside of herself, pushing against her walls. Her fingers add pressure, asking herself to expand into the feeling. She has the other hand working to open herself up from the outside.

The next time she had her fingers against his scalp, she was tugging his hair on purpose to feel that urgency of a man who clawed into her shoulders, who spoke in motions, all hip-thrusts and love-bites, and emptied himself into her.

It’s not enough, she needs more hands. She moves from stroking the clit to button-mashing. She is hammering, she is begging herself, as she begins to throb.

She needs hands touching her breasts, wrapping around and grabbing the meat of her ass. She needs Felix who filled her all the way up with hands to spare.

The last memory is his face, grinning, a smile that reached his eyes and softened their sharp edges before she pulled him down to kiss. His name tumbles from her mouth, “Felix Fee—Fe-Felix.”

Shocks wreck her, as she comes in waves across herself. Sine waves, crash into tangent waves; bolts shoot up her spine. Cosines send interference up and down the ripples of time, twitching her legs.

She is sloppy and hot, and the satisfaction is a strong pull throughout her entire abdomen.

But the feeling of fullness passes, and she hugs herself in bed imagining Felix at her back.

**3.10: T - 21 hours, 40 min; (03:20)**

Felix doesn’t believe in supersymmetry. He wasn’t sure when physics had become a matter of belief as opposed to fact. His peers are barking up the wrong tree looking for one unifying theory, one panacea to tie a neat bow on the standard model. There’s no one particle out there made to perfectly complement your particle.

It’s too neat and clean and life is messy and often unpleasant.

And if he were to fall in love, he knows that it would be part ambitious trainwreck and part blissful domesticity: mornings eating appetizing food in pleasurable company, sublime evenings spent solving an equation that takes pages and pages. And it would be messy, like a kiss that still tastes like sex the next morning. So no, he doesn’t believe in the deus ex machina of supersymmetry.

Then, there’s entanglement, what Einstein called, “spooky action at a distance.” Particles that are entangled can be light-years away, and yet if one experiences a change in its condition, the other would instantly mirror it.

At 3:26 am Byleth’s phone flashed Felix’s name and threatened to earthquake itself off her dresser.

“Felix?” Her voice was groggy. He wondered if she was waking from the same dream that he was: wandering through a crowded family gathering only to remember that he didn’t have any family to find.

“Byleth, I looked into those space squids.”

“You did?”

“The theories about them are sketchy though, no real evidence at all.”

“Indeed.”

“I don’t think you should count on it.”

“Thanks for your input.”

Without events to latch onto, it’s difficult for the mind to measure duration. During isolation experiments, humans tend to underestimate how much time has passed by 20 to 40 percent. They’ll think they were waiting for forty minutes; it’ll have been an hour.

Hours might have passed, but Byleth’s silences never felt too long.

“I had a hard day today,” he said.

“I thought you seemed quiet.”

“If I asked you to come over here, would you do it?”

The radio waves were quiet, and this silence felt long. Perhaps it was merely a matter of seconds, a moment or two.

Theorists didn’t do well with the unbalanced and unstable. They weren’t perfect. They would never be perfect, but they were perfectionists.

Psychologically, the brain might underestimate duration in isolation, but if you want to talk space-time, time passes more slowly for objects in motion. And Felix’s heart was zooming.

Did Byleth time-out? Had he short-circuited her?

“Nevermi—”

“I would!” she said abruptly. “If you asked me to.”

Felix could almost taste Byleth on his lips again, but what he really wanted were her arms around him. What he really wanted was for her to shield him in space, just for the night.

“It was—today was—the anniversary of… my brother died. I don’t want to talk about it. I just thought to tell you. So I’m kind of a trainwreck some of the time.”

“You hide it well.” They breathe and they are learning: What causes one to say something; the effect of words on the other.

“Do you believe in spirits?”

Despite their hard science armor, physicists are among the most likely to be agnostic. It’s often not organized religion, either. Many believe in a universal spirit, some kind of higher power with mysteries deeper than the phenomenal world.

The most beautiful theory Felix had ever heard was the self-organized universe. This greatest, largest ecosystem, having emerged from some whim of the cosmos, and within it, systems inside of systems, emergent systems all the way down.

“Even if I did, there’s nothing we can do for them. We just have to do our best in the here and now.”

“That’s… exactly what I needed to hear.” He was quiet for a moment before saying, “Talking to you doesn’t suck.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m a trainwreck too.”

Felix thought about what Catherine said. About Byleth’s father and playing pool.

“I never would have known if you hadn’t picked me up from a bar the first time we met.”

It was a white lie and one he was proud of. Anyone who’s stepped foot in Byleth’s lab would know what a mess she was.

She laughed, and he remembered the purple stains he left all over her body. “Let’s go out tomorrow.” He hoped she couldn’t hear how his breath came short over the words. “Pour one out for Glenn, play some pool.”

In the end, you can reason all you want, but sometimes it’s only faith that saves us from unbearable durations. Faith that we aren’t alone.

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yes, I want that. You should try to get some sleep, though. You’re going to look like hell tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t believe in hell, you superstitious hack.”

She laughed, and even when she stopped laughing, he left the phone on until he could hear her snuffle into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As far as we know, bees can’t actually tell time aside from their seasonal harvest cycles. I made that up because it sounded cute.
> 
> Data on psychological effects of duration and time from Buonomano (2017).
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	4. Synthesis

**4\. Synthesis**

_“There is our past: all the events that happened before what we can witness now. There is our future: the events that will happen after the moment from which we can see the here and now. Between this past and this future there is an interval that is neither past nor future and still has duration: fifteen minutes on Mars; eight years on Proxima b; millions of years in the Andromeda galaxy. It is the expanded present.”_

**4.1: T - 16 hours, 30 min; (07:30)**

“Order something else. I’ve never seen you eat just one meal before.” Morning-Shamir was a demon of sardony. But she wasn’t wrong. Byleth ignored her, the same way she was also ignoring Catherine and Shamir’s hands on each other’s thighs under the table. Because she was a good friend.

“Yeah, Chatterbox, no one’s robbed our kitchen, you know. We have plenty.” Hapi nodded to the lavender-haired chef tamping down espresso grounds at the bar. Byleth waved them both off and sipped at her freshly poured coffee.

“So, By, want to watch a movie with us tonight?” Catherine asked after swigging her lukewarm latte like it was a lukewarm beer. Both disgusting.

“I have plans.”

“Since when? How is beating some losers at pool for the hundredth week in a row more interesting than hanging out with us?” Catherine was gesturing adamantly with her toast and dropping crumbs across the table. Hapi came back around with a wet towel and handed it to Shamir: _if she keeps making a mess, you handle it._

Byleth smiled, “Another night, though.” She hit up the cashier to pay their tab.

“Was she _smiling_?” Hapi asked, thoroughly disturbed.

“It hits hardest the first time you see it,” Shamir said. “You almost get used to it, though.”

“If you say so.”

**4.2: T - 15 hours, 15 min; (08:45)**

“Greetings professor, nothing to report! Except, Dr. Felix Fraldarius is already here this morning, and if you ask me, he seems to be acting a little strangely. He‘ll walk a few paces with a spring in his step, and then all of a sudden, he stops himself and walks like he’s heading to a funeral. Next thing you know, he’s excited again. Is something going on?”

“Nothing that I know of,” Byleth said quickly.

“He almost reminds me of a chivalric lord, pining for his courtly love. Say have you heard the legend of the—”

“—More legends, Gatekeeper?” Catherine grinned. “Have you been reading those war romances, again?”

Sometimes smut romances spawned on the physics library shelves. No one knew who put them there. They sent the interns down to donate them, but the only charity they were really donating to was the Gatekeeper’s overactive imagination.

“It’s always science with all of you.” Cheeks pink. He was a difficult one to make blush, but if anyone could do it, it was Catherine. “You never know, though.”

“You’re such a hopeless romantic,” Byleth chided as they waved and made their way to the stairs.

“Do you have the gatekeeper spying on Felix?” Catherine asked, taking the stairs two at a time. 

“He’s my researcher.” She said it like he was a prize-winning combatant. “It’s good to know when he’s here. For the sake of performance.”

“‘Performance’,” Shamir said, putting it in air quotes.

Even a few days after Seteth’s rousing staff meeting about interpersonal etiquette in the lab, the place buzzed with energy. Scientists thronged the coffee station chatting. Researchers were strolling around in their good shoes. And have you ever seen a researcher stroll? It’s like watching a paper clip do the moonwalk.

All twitterpated and it was nearly Winter. But when you spend twelve hours a day inside doing math, time loses all meaning.

It seemed like everyone was in a good mood except for Felix. The moment Byleth emerged with Catherine and Shamir from the stairwell, Felix zinged a grump-panic expression across the room and darted behind the astronomy lab’s solid wood door. Sylvain, with whom he had been mid-conversation, looked from Byleth to the wooden door before following him through.

“What’s your malfunction, Fe? Byleth cracking the whip on your research output? I thought you guys were working late by choice.”

“Wasn’t working last night.” Felix’s voice started loud and defensive. “Late last night, I was on the phone.” Each statement was quieter than the next. Sylvain’s eyebrows shot into his perfect flyaway bangs. “I asked Professor Eisner out on a date.” This, a mere mumble.

There was Sylvain’s shrill whistle he hated so much. Would it be better to punch Sylvain now, or listen to his advice first?

“That’s great. I bet she’s wild outside the lab. Happy for you guys. And don’t forget what I said about double-dating. Just as soon as I find someone…”

Felix had his hand cuffed for the punch, then he used it to grab his own hair. Clawed fingers wrecked his pony-tail. “This is a mistake.”

“Maybe, but it would be a good, hot, very sexy mistake.” 

Felix groaned. Weeks and weeks of being stuck in his pent up limbo seemed to dual-tone his voice. It was torture to listen to.

“Fe, you need to chill. Maybe ask Manuela for some of her ‘medicine.’” Felix shook his head. “Look. This whole stupid world is made from one big mistake after another. You call it entropy, some of us call it evolution. The thing is, without mistakes nothing moves forward. Don’t you want to know if this thing between the two of you is real?”

Felix didn’t say yes or no, which was a yes.

“Tell her how you feel, that you want to be the plus-magnet to her minus-magnet, or however you guys talk.”

“How do you know I want that?”

“Fe, I hate to tell you, but everyone knows you want that. Didn’t you hear that quip Dr. Seteth made during staff meeting? Something about the interpersonal relationships around the lab being a supercharged electro-magnetic field lately. Well, you and Byleth are rogue electric charges sparking up everything.”

“What nonsense.” Being spiteful cheered Felix up slightly. He raised his head. “What do you mean everybody knows?”

“You can’t see it because you’re too close to the equation.”

“Don’t Heisenberg me, just say what you mean.”

“All I’m saying is you and Byleth are sickeningly into each other. It’s painfully obvious, and honestly a little cringe. Those hickeys on her neck, those were yours, right?” Felix only nodded. “The bite on your neck, that was hers?” He nodded again.

“Well, she hasn’t had any hickeys since then. I’ve been keeping watch.” Sylvain wiggled his eyebrows. Felix opened his mouth, sharp tongue framing an insult— “Keeping watch _for you_ , you monster. Just do us all a favor and make this mistake?”

Meanwhile, Byleth had three different books of arcane quanta open on her desk and she couldn’t focus on any one of them. Was Felix ever going to come out of the astronomy lab, or would he be working there all day?

When in doubt, email. Right?

_Dr. Fraldarius, I hope this email finds you well…_

Haha, bad joke. Then he really would have a reason to avoid her.

More like,  
_Dr. Fraldarius, you asked me out at 3 am and now you’re avoiding me in the room with all the space rocks. And we don’t study space rocks, Felix. I don’t know how you think this looks. But to me, it looks pretty bad._

_Pretty bad indeed…_

* * *

To: FFraldarius@machlabs.com  
From: BEisner@machlabs.com  
Date: T - 14 hours, 30 min; (09:30)

Subject: review of literatures

Dr. Fraldarius,

We need to begin writing a review of literatures regarding the theory on the Quantum Entanglement article. I know that qualitative writing is neither of our strong suits, so the sooner we begin the review, the better. It will, of course, begin with Einstein and relativity. We can certainly speed our way through the material, but let’s be thorough with our first draft.

All Best,  
Byleth Eisner  
Associate Professor of Physics, Mach University  
Head Researcher, Mach Labs

* * *

To: BEisner@machlabs.com  
From: FFraldarius@machlabs.com  
Date: T - 14 hours, 18 min; (09:42)

Subject: Re: review of literatures

I will begin an outline.

—FF

* * *

To: FFraldarius@machlabs.com  
From: BEisner@machlabs.com  
Date: T - 12 hours, 47 min; (11:13)

Subject: Re: Re: review of literatures

Dr. Fraldarius, it would be easier if we could confer on this project in person.

Best,  
Byleth

* * *

To: FFraldarius@machlabs.com  
From: BEisner@machlabs.com  
Date: T - 10 hour, 37 min; (13:23)

Subject: Re: Re: Re: review of literatures

What’s so interesting in the astronomy lab? And do you intend to stay in there all day?

* * *

Felix poked his head out of the wooden door he was hiding behind. He and Byleth stared each other down across the desks. His face was scrunched and frustrated, hers livid with eyebrows crossed nearly to a ‘V’ above narrowed eyes.

He started to blush just as Dr. Seteth emerged from his office and was immediately caught in the cross-fire of their intense stares. Seteth upped the ante with his scowl and stomped away.

Shortly after, Byleth received this email:

* * *

To: BEisner@machlabs.com  
From: Seteth@Machlabs.com  
Date: T - 10 hours 33 min; (13:27)

Subject: Come to My Office

In 20 minutes.

AB,  
Seteth  
Head Researcher, Mach Labs

* * *

Byleth walked into Seteth’s office, hang-dog like a kid being sent to the principal. “Professor, you’re a practical person,” Seteth said, shutting the door, indicating a seat, and pouring her a 10-cent-a-bag Earl Gray.

“I like to think so.”

Byleth steeled herself for the conversation about her inappropriate behavior. Her rebuttal? Getting into a scowling match with your junior researcher might be highly unprofessional, but it certainly wasn’t sexual. It _wasn’t_ sexual, _right_? 

“You study time, and you know just how limited our lifespans are in the grand scheme.” Byleth couldn’t tell if Seteth was drinking tea or sipping on steam. It was oddly intimidating.

“I try not to think about it.”

“Have you heard the phrase ‘you only live once’?”

“YOLO, Dr. Seteth?”

“YOLO, Professor Eisner.”

He shuffled a printout on his desk.

“I’ve prepared the forms for a Consensual Relationship Agreement. You will find them very straight-forward. In addition to assuring us that there is nothing untoward happening in your workplace relationship, signing this limits the liability of the lab’s assets and intellectual property were something to go wrong between you and your partner.”

“You YOLO me and now you’re giving me dating forms? Is this your way of asking me out, Dr. Seteth?”

“No. No no no. No. No no.” He shook his head in distaste. “No.”

Byleth looked shocked. “One ‘no’ would have been sufficient.”

“If you say so.” He shook his head again. “This is about you and Dr. Fraldarius. Get him to sign the forms, and please refrain from giving each other such scandalous looks when others are around. It’s starting to make some people feel uncomfortable.”

“But Felix and I aren’t a couple.”

“I’m not concerned with the semantics.”

“No,” Byleth said taking a sip of the leaf water to slow herself down. “I mean we aren’t dating. I mean, we were supposed to go on a date, but he’s acting strange, and I don’t know if I’ve done something wrong.”

Seteth was a deer in the headlights. She gave him about fifteen seconds before he turned this name-plaque over on his desk, said, _this office is yours now,_ and fled the premises just to get away from her.

“Are you asking me how to date someone, Professor Eisner?” Byleth shook her head slightly. Technically Seteth didn’t outrank her. But in spirit, she was a mere child compared to him. “You’re among the most intelligent minds we could recruit. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“I see,” Byleth raised the cup and swallowed hard. The hot leaf water scalded the back of her throat. “Thank you, Seteth.”

“Nice day, Byleth.”

She remained seated in the chair, looking at the papers as if they were orders for her to conjure roses out of her ass pending termination, and not a simple formality declaring her intention to date the guy she had been salivating over for months.

He peered up at her from his desk, fancy fountain pen held ready between his fingers.

“Please leave now, Professor Eisner. I’m busy.”

“Right,” she jumped from her seat. “Of course, Dr. Seteth.”

Byleth signed the form, cloaked it in a plain manila envelope, and sent it under the astronomy lab door. It sported a post-it, saying:

_‘Are we still on for tonight? Or, should I take your current behavior to mean you’re canceling? If you still want to meet me at the Downer, sign these forms and get them in to Seteth’s office before the end of day. Also, destroy this note.'_

**4.3: T - 7 hours, 15 min; (16:45)**

To: BEisner@machlabs.com, FFraldarius@machlabs.com  
CC: Seteth@machlabs.com  
From: HR@Machlabs.com  
Date: T - 7 hours, 15 min; (16:45)

Subject: Confirmation of Receipt “Consensual Relationship Agreement”

Dear Professor Eisner and Dr. Fraldarius,

This is a confirmation that Mach Laboratories has formally received your Consensual Relationship Agreement. Please review our Employee Dating Policy on your own time.

AB,  
Seteth  
Head Researcher, Mach Labs

* * *

To: BEisner@machlabs.com  
From: FFraldarius@machlabs.com  
Date: T - 7 hours, 7 min; (16:53)

Subject: I turned in the forms

See you tonight.

—FF

**4.4: T - 2 hours; (22:00)**

The Downer was dimly lit and low-ceilinged when Byleth stepped in, but it was always like that. As soon as the door opened and light from the outside poured through, more than half of the heads throughout the bar turned toward the door to see who was coming in. But it was always like that too.

It was 1$ PBR night, but Byleth wasn’t going to do that to herself. That night she felt like tequila, it had been a while since she had tequila.

Felix was there already. Fresh black sweater, teal chinos. He had tied his hair back with artful lines of bangs framing his face. It was meant to look unintentional but likely took at least thirty minutes.

With his pool cue already in hand, Felix let her order a drink and walk over to meet him.

Watching him watch her, Byleth’s pulse thumped in her throat. She wished she had worn a skirt or a least something with more _intention_ than the jeans and knit sweater she had thrown on.

“Fancy meeting you here.” The corner of his mouth twitched. Was that a smile? She was blessed. “More sugary drinks?”

“This one’s more sour than sweet.” He smirked fully this time, a raised eyebrow. His whiskey glass sat neglected on the edge of the pool table. She grabbed a pool cue, a familiar weight in her hands. Once they started playing, everything would be easier.

“Um, about work today…”

“Oh,” A blush lit through her face. “I don’t want to talk about work. Just don’t do that again, okay?”

“Okay.”

The more you zoom out from a complex system the simpler it seems. When modeling complexity, there are layers that you pass through.

When far away, everything looks simple and perfect. Then, you zoom in a little more, and you see all the tiny details and overlooked factors that go into that larger point of view. It can be too much to take in all at once; you have to start thinking in statistics to compartmentalize it.

Get a little closer, and those systems start looking neat and tidy and simple again. Statistical mechanics helps you to summarize the processes; wrap them up in differential equations. Then, under the next layer of perspective, BAM! It’s pure fucking chaos of tiny movers moving and tiny processes happening. Everything’s a mess, there are so many impulses, you don’t know where to look.

People are like that too.

Decisions aren’t easy. Decisions are based on many complex factors. And if we want to get anywhere with getting to know someone intimately, we must sometimes forgive them for hiding behind a closed door among the space rocks, even when we dearly want to see them.

“Care to play pool with me?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” She had that relaxed swagger from the first time he met her. Her ego was hot and everywhere and he could feel it in his bones. “Ready to lose?”

Her boastful smile seemed to loosen something in him. He was on this trajectory, whether it was a mistake or a miracle. The had momentum; they were already in motion.

There were two kinds of friction that could now alter their course. There was the friction of them deciding that they didn’t like each other and this was a bad idea. Let’s call it the ‘awkward’ friction.

And then there was the other kind of friction. Though it was certainly physical, this friction went against the laws of physics. It was the friction of their bodies heating up together, the friction of his hand drifting across hers to hand her the triangle so she could rack up the balls.

It was the friction of their knit sweaters brushing and sending static electricity to prickle like a storm across her skin and make her _feel something_ , feel good enough to take him home. The friction of moving inside of her, of his finger on her soft tongue, of her lips burning into his jaw. We’ll call this one the ‘sexy’ friction.

The ‘sexy’ friction would only speed up their trajectory. Exponentially.

“This time, I don’t think I will lose,” he said. “See, pool is all physics, force and vectors, and I’m very good at physics.”

“Is that so?”

Byleth laughed, a deep belly laugh that sent her shoulders in waves. And everything that was wrong with spending time with Felix melted away. There was nothing wrong with it. In fact, to many of the more difficult questions swirling through Byleth’s chaosmos, it seemed to be the right answer.

They shot some pool. Felix nailed stripes on the break. Every turn was a new angle. An enticing dance of leaning over, sipping their drinks, trading appraising glances, and cracking the cue to win. They hadn’t set a wager, but they both wanted to win.

Byleth had three balls on the table and Felix had two. To Byleth’s breathless astonishment, he knocked both balls in on that turn. She leaned over the table in exactly the childlike way she had been told not to do when her dad first taught her how to play.

She could barely watch him sink the 8. She couldn’t look away. There was nothing sexier than tasting defeat at her own game. She wanted to taste it across his chest; she wanted to taste in the tingling rye from his tongue; she wanted to taste all his lover’s spit.

“You crushed me!” Her eyes were dilating into 8 balls of their own.

His smile was cocky, his saunter was cocky. She was thinking about his cock again.

“Oh please. I scraped by.”

“Too bad we didn’t wager anything,” she said. She was leaning back against the pool table. A signature move of nonchalance, as if losing didn’t mean a thing to her.

_[proof 4.1]: Does Byleth Want to be Kissed?_

Let,  
_B_ = Byleth Eisner  
_F_ = Felix Fraldarius  
Given,  
When _F_ kissed _B_ in the past, _B_ seemed to enjoy it*.

Late nights together in the lab = Work well together**.  
Work well together => 3 am phone calls***.  
3 am phone calls => _F_ asking _B_ on a date.  
_F_ asking _B_ on a date => _B_ giving _F_ a Consensual Relationship Agreement.

* _B_ ’s eyes had flickered shut, and her mouth had opened for _F_ , while her hands had gone frantic trying to pull him closer into her.  
** When _B_ had handed _F_ his promotion offer, he could have sworn she was giving him the ‘do me’ eyes.   
*** It was so nice to hear _B_ ’s voice over the phone, _F_ wasn’t even thinking about sex. Not the whole time. What’s the word for just enjoying spending time with someone? Or, better yet, what’s the word for combining mutual time enjoyed with sexual fantasies?

Qualitative observations,  
The way _B_ was watching _F_ just then, eyes dark and dilated, and still looking like she could end his world. Or, at least, beat him fair and square the next round of pool.  
The way _F_ would let her end him and come back asking for more.  
_F_ could swear _B_ ’s lips were quivering toward his. Was she thinking about it too? Was she? _Was she?_

Findings,  
Byleth is interested in Felix and would like him to kiss her.

QED

He bent his head forward, and Byleth rocked onto her toes. She placed her hand on the back of his neck, guiding him. A soft kiss bloomed between them, something tentative and experimental. It was so different than what they knew to expect: the biting, the sucking, the combative tongue spar of their one-night stand. This was comforting, the way Byleth felt wrapped in Felix’s coat. It was intriguing, the way Felix felt cloaked in Byleth’s research.

She was pulling him toward her. She wanted him more—more and deeper. All the way in her throat, filling up a forgotten well of energy somewhere in her chest. Her mouth dropped open for him, inviting him in, coaxing him against her again. Her fingernails pricked at his hairline, until—

Felix pulled back and Byleth groaned.

“What is this?” His voice was slightly hoarse as he stepped backward. “Just tequila? Just drinking and taking someone home?”

“No, Felix.”

“There’s more at stake now. We’re working together so if this is just—”

“This something I want.”

“Tell me about it.” His tone was earnest, and he was looking her right in the eyes, that brutal gravitational pull. They both dropped the contact. 

She stepped toward him, staring at his chin, at his neck. “If—if you were a large rock in deep space,” she said, toying nervously with the collar of his sweater. “I would be drawn to orbit your gravity.” He nodded, seeing where this was going. “Even in remotest space, our friction would keep each other warm.”

He cackled. It sounded crackly, like it was coming through too much feedback on a walkie-talkie radio wave. “Oh yeah?”

“You’re the selectron to my electron; the gluon to my quark; we’re a pair of branes held together by strings. I’d get stuck in a wormhole with you and let time loop to infinity together.”

“You don’t even believe in most of those theories.”

“I believe in this.” Her hand was on his chest, over his heart where he had the time-cone tattooed. A symbol of time’s distortion right under her fingers below a layer of soft cashmere.

“See, feel:” she took his hand and pressed it against her neck under the corner of her jaw to track her pulse. As he touched her skin the frequency shot up.

If her dilated pupils were truly black holes, he would surrender to being nothing. Though, he wasn’t going to say it out loud the way that she had.

He couldn’t help it, his body was against hers, he was kissing her again.

People were looking. They didn’t care.

He wanted to absorb all the words through her mouth. He wanted to consume her. His mouth moved to her jaw, to that quickening pulse in her neck.

“I want to big bang with you.” Her words were rushed. She was slipping into him.

“That’s so embarrassing.” His mouth was traveling down her neck. He looked up through his eyelashes, “Say it again.”

“I want to take you home and introduce you to Schrodingus Cat.”

He cackled. “You,” he said bringing his mouth to her lips. “Big,” he kissed her cheek. “Nerd,” he said into her ear before rimming it with his tongue. She squirmed, and he could feel it under his hands and in the thin air between them.

“Do you… do you want any of this?” Byleth asked biting her lip. Her eyes were aurora-green and so large they could swallow him.

“Absolutely, all of it. You’re pretty slow on the uptake, you know?”

“What was all that in the lab today, then?”

“I had to think through some things.”

“And?”

“Can’t you read between the lines?”

“I’m better at calculating under the curve,” she teased.

“Fine.” He shook his head. “But I’m only going to say this once. Byleth, I’ve been all-in for you since the moment you first took me home. Actually since the third time you beat me in pool and told me I needed to find my motivation. You’re completely irritating, you know that?”

He gripped her hips and lifted her onto the edge of the pool table. Startled by the sudden teleportation, she swayed above. Behind her, those losing shots still stood waiting to be cleared away. He stepped between her legs, “I want to be your—”

Felix’s mouth came upward against hers, transmitting hot desperate kisses, full of fury and delight and the need to make up for lost time. She was already panting into his mouth and wriggling her body closer to his. Her hands grabbed his ponytail and tucked at his messy bangs.

“—only one,” he whispered into her lips.

The lights weren’t dim enough, and the ceilings weren’t low enough for them to be grinding at the bar. Nonetheless, Byleth scooted so close to Felix’s hips that her legs were about to drop off the pool table on either side of his.

“You’re going to take me home now,” he said leaning his forehead against hers. His eyes blazed up the green fields in hers.

“I am.” She pulled his hand up to her mouth and ran her lips across the equation tattooed there.

“And you won’t kick me out in the morning.”

“I won’t.” He kissed the corners made by her smile.

“Good, because I want a full demonstration of those space squids you keep thinking about.” Byleth’s embarrassed laughter prickled down his spine and surrounded him with the atmosphere he had been craving since she’d left him in bed that morning months ago.

He wanted to see her free again. He wanted her to lose control all over him.

He couldn’t stop himself from tangling his hand in her hair. He couldn’t stop himself from pulling her closer to him so that they were sharing space, clipping through each other like collisionless meshes in a video game. And then he stepped back and she was leading him home.

**4.5: T - 30 min; (23:30)**

Dingus greeted them at Byleth’s door. That’s unusual.

“Hello, Dingus,” Byleth said, “You’re feeling social tonight.”

Dingus was a gray cat with white boots that scratched at Byleth’s jeans in prayer for a midnight snack. Byleth indulged him. After all, she had her own midnight snack to look forward to.

She walked into the kitchen and tossed a bunch of metal spoons into the refrigerator. She would be prepared this time.

“Dingus?” Felix asked peering around the apartment while Byleth dropped cat treats out of a tin.

He remembered it now. Emptier than outer space of personal effects. Every bit of furniture that was used and loved seemed to belong to the cat. Byleth lived her life in the lab.

It seemed so intimate now, the way he had gotten to know her: a drunken night playing pool, late nights researching. Perhaps those things were more home to her than this sanctum. 

Intimate, like seeing Byleth’s bare feet padding across the floor, shoes kicked off.

“Short for Schrodingus Cat. We’ve been together since undergrad. He doesn’t usually like new people, though. The probability of him coming out at all is—”

“50/50?” Felix said to nip another bad joke in the bud.

“No, I was going to say under 17 percent, I’ve mapped it. Hypothesis: he dislikes most people; however, like us, he’s curious. He needs to know what’s going on.”

“Like us…” It’s stupid that Byleth is feet away from him. He fixes that error, crossing the distance in sure strides.

Then, Felix’s hands are on her, tugging her back into his arms. His hands rove her body, seeking to reacquaint themselves with every part of her. His fingers seek out the curve of her spin, they feel the arc of her shoulder blades, they sink low to cup her ass and pull her against him.

Her body is melting into his, every touch freeing some restriction as she loses control over how she’s moving, surrendering to instinct and burning need that has dropped from her chest straight through her stomach.

And it’s everything she wanted. The present is coming to meet them.

**4.6: T = 0; (24:00)**

Felix slips his hand into her hair, and she’s rising up to him, rolling onto the tips of her toes and seeking him with half-parted lips.

There is nothing important but her leg rising off the ground to wrap around his hips. There is nothing happening in the world right now but their impulse to tangle so deeply that there is no beginning or end; there is only now. The great meaningful expanded now.

“Where do you want me?”

“As far inside of me as you can get.”

His cackle sends her hands shooting into his hair. “That’s a given.” His grin sends her hips bumping against his.

He wanted her against the wall, and he’s pushing her, hoping to stain those minimalist white walls the purple of lust.

His mouth is on her neck, and she knows what will happen. She’s about to become his again. It’s more natural than quanta; it’s a part of the soul.

And it stings while the blood flocks to his mouth, as he sucks on her throat. And it hurts, and she groans into it because if he stops, she will never forgive him.

His hands travel to her back, to the leg lifted around him, and he can’t help himself he’s already grinding them hard. He’s not shy now, and he knows what he wants, and it’s maddening that he’s still wrapped up in wools—

“Your fucking coat, Felix!”

Her neck is a singing sore when he draws back. Two shrugs, one shake, the coat drops to the floor in a puddle of teal atmosphere.

His turtleneck clings to his chest, a cashmere more sinful than satin. She has her hands tucked under it in a matter of moments, while Felix is pulling her own tight knitted shirt over her head.

They’re stuck because her hands are on him and his hands are trying to pull the shirt off her. It’s hanging on her arms.

They might have calculated a dozen formulae to ray-trace through time and space, but for the moment, the paradox of Byleth’s hands having to leave Felix’s chest so that her shirt can fall to the floor, is too much.

“Shirt,” Felix grunts.

“Fuck,” Byleth grabs it from her arms and pulls it off, letting it fall into his coat. Felix steps back.

Half naked. She was _half-naked_. Breast pressed together by her bra and stacked on muscle. His eyes were caught in the perfect aporia of not knowing where to look first.

The soft smile on her face that told him she knew just how tantalizing she was? The planes of her stomach, and then up, up over the breasts, delicate collarbones? A neck made to be held?

Gazing at her, it’s like he’s touching her without having to lay a finger. Her anticipation flares up, more than an itch. It’s a necessity.

Meanwhile, he’s contemplating l-shaped words. There are things that he wants to say, and if her brain weren’t soaked in pheromones, she would tell him that he would have time enough to find the ways to say them. Later.

Instead, she undoes her bra in one simple movement. His eyes wing wide, and he’s grinning, and she’s grinning. He squeezes and strokes a nipple to watch her face shudder. She arches her back and he rubs harder, and she’s panting through bared teeth.

It’s time for revenge, to make him feel the heat that was burning up in her core, to break his patience and make him breathy and needy.

It’s her turn to pull off that sweater, because as good as it looks on him, it would look even better on the floor so that she can kiss the spaces of his shoulder and run her mouth over his stomach. She does it slowly. She performs his striptease for him, pretending not to notice the plea in his eyes.

Because she feels it too, and right then she’s been teased and pinched so much that she needs something, fingers, tongue, dick, something up inside her or she’ll go mad.

She grabs his hand and tugs him along to the stairs. He knows where the bedroom is. Remembers it from some other life, some other scale of time. It’s lofted above them, hanging in a converted attic space above the apartment.

They make it only to the first landing where the stairs turn back around to save space, and she’s pinning him to the railing and unzipping his pants. Her hands push down at his hips and play at the hair she finds there.

But Felix doesn’t react well to teasing, so he’s pushing himself into her hand. Dick straining toward the elastic of his boxers, he’s biting his lower lip just from wanting her to touch him.

Finally, she’s pushing down his underwear, and she’s holding his penis, and it’s hot and heavy in her hand. The relief is immediate but short-lived because now he needs her to do something with it. His mouth comes down where her neck and shoulder meet. She jerks him inelegantly and he wants every bit of it. There’s nothing in his head but desire, and her fingers rubbing on him, too hard even, irritatingly hard. 

Everything is so fucking fucking hard and good.

Except for Byleth, he discovers, as his hands crawl down the front of her pants, and nook shallowly into her folds. She shudders and rubs against him, breasts dragging on his chest and making his breath hitch, while incoherent sounds echo through the chamber at the back of her throat.

She is soft and wet, and so so hot. And her mouth is parting open, and her shoulders are throwing back.

It’s Zeno’s paradox how they make it to the bed, with one hand down each other’s pants. With their bodies refusing to be more than a few centimeters from the other. With Byleth’s other hand tangling in Felix’s hair trying to bring it down the rough way, and with Felix’s other hand cupping a breast with his thumb flicking back and forth over a hard nipple.

Their shuffling feet find the room from pure force of will. And it is a miracle when Byleth is finally able to push Felix over her bed, leave her pants behind on the floor, and climb on top of him to soak in his darkened lust-filled eyes.

His hand fists in her hair, and he pulls to bring her head up to him. It’s fierce but it’s careful.

He likes everything about her. Especially the things that bug him to no end, especially when she’s driving him crazy, doing things that make him wish could be indifferent to her. But he wants to be with her again. _He wants—_

“Felix, please,” she says into his chest, pressing against the time and the formulas etched into his skin. She runs her mouth over the tattoo. Under her circling tongue, the cone of time morphs into an infinity sign.

She is so hot and wet and ready, he spears two his fingers upward into her, and she arches her back and grinds against his hand. The view is tantalizing, he uses his other arm to hook her down to him, so he can put his mouth on her breasts. His fingers move inside her, curling to find the places that make her pull on his hair and pant into his neck.

His cock is so heavy. “Tell me what you want.”

“You,” she moans downward and raises her face to see him, while his fingers continue expanding and rubbing inside her. “I want you.”

He is a creature of ice. Negative celsius, a man of the Winter. And she is melting him.

“You have me,” he says against her brow. His fingers curl more gently and expand against her walls, and he can feel her begin to throb. “I’m right here.” The sincerity in his voice is threatening to break them both open.

She reaches under her, hands damp from sweat and she takes him in hand again. She trails her fingers along his length. So softly it drives him crazy. Fuck. He wants it hard. Fuck. It feels so good.

His fingers leave her, and he holds her hips to guide her down to him.

She stretches around his dick. That soft pain of being impaled, before the need sets in and the fit becomes perfect for her to sink all the way down to his hips as his mouth drops blissfully open. The _you yoouu you! yooouuus_ that she was singing in his ear turn into _ooohs_.

She glides above him. His fingers have an intelligence all their own as they find their way under her to rub at her clit. They make much more sophisticated swiping motions than his brain is capable of directing, while her body unravels every inch of his.

The first time she comes with her teeth biting into Felix’s neck, she’s a firebrand pulsing around him. He groans and tugs her hair. It’s so much.

There are words in his gasps while she pounds each breaking wave-frequency against him. His breath tries to spell something. Even though words to them are calculations, and every letter is a variable where a new equation of cosmic truth can invade the phenomenal world and rack them with more feeling and nerves than anything has the right to.

Felix gasps little dotted _i’s_ and Byleth is groaning her _ooohs_ through blissful sound waves, and then there are the _luvs_ that his breath is humming into her neck.

She pretends not to hear it, that it’s nothing. Simple syncopated sounds. Because there will be other times for the _i’s_ and the _luvs_ and the _ooohs_.

They are much too new and blissful. Tonight, she wants to think with her blissful mind popping off and her body creating fire all around. He is the only thing she can imagine wanting as deep inside her as her own identity. Tonight, let it be new.

And Felix thinks, if he was stuck in a time loop with Byleth, repeating only this moment from here to t plus infinity, he would never get sick of the way her tongue rubs against his. He could never be bored of the incredible friction inside her, gliding like fluid dynamics, savoring the bumps along the way.

He’s sucking bruises into her shoulder and she’s tugging at his hair with her fingernails running against his scalp, when he realizes he’s edging. He can’t hold it back much longer.

He pushes himself deep into Byleth and stops moving, glutes quivering to hold himself up in her. He brings his hand to rub her folds again; he just needs to get her close. He rubs into her slick heat until he can feel her begin to clench around him.

“I’m ready,” she gasps. “Come on, come on. I want to take you there.” His groan as they began moving is as much vibration as she needed to start setting off again.

She notches her fingers into his shoulders. The way she’s moving her hips, she knows what he’s thinking. She won’t let him stop.

He comes, and she is flaring around him. A rip in spacetime. Blood rushes behind his eyes. She’s grinning and her body is buzzing his.

He pulls her down to him and holds her against himself. And no part of him wants to leave any part of her, so they tangle.

They are blessedly spent when she falls against his body. Her legs interlock with his. He keeps his arms wrapped, and kisses her in the curve from her temple to her jaw. A secret calculus, just between the two of them.

They’re clipping into each other again. Two particles, sharing the same point in time, the same quantum state: they are changed. And though they may drift away from each other in the night, their time will always be a shared property.

**4.8: T + 10 hours; (10:00)**

In the morning, they will lie awake in a room dappled with sunlight from Byleth’s attic window, as they both bemoan the morning birds calling through to them. They will attempt to share space for as long as possible before getting up.

She will take him to Village Coffee. He will order his coffee black, and she will order corncakes and honey-butter. He will pour hot sauce all over his meat-filled omelet, and she will grin into her bergamot tea.

Maybe he’ll become a regular too.

**4.x: T + ∞**

<3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thanks for supporting this story. It's so fun to see people into hot nerds.
> 
> Thanks for reading and take care!


End file.
